The Route to making outdoor more measurable

One of the main gripes about out of home advertising from agencies and advertisers alike is that it’s notoriously difficult to measure accurately, both in terms of number of impressions delivered and overall effectiveness. This week the industry took a significant step to address this with the relaunch of research body Postar as Route. Whilst Postar took advertising locations as its starting point, Route is a people-focused measuring system, incorporating GPS travel data taken from 28,000 individuals, who each carried a GPS meter for nine days.

 

The research was conducted over nearly 4 years and cost £19million; it created 19 billion GPS records for analysis and this will increase by a further 3.3 billion each year. Once movements were mapped, Route and its research partner Ipsos MediaCT started to calculate the number of people that would pass any of the 450,000 outdoor advertising ‘frames’ that cover the UK, while eye-tracking research was used to work out the likelihood that a passer-by would notice the frame.

 

According to Route this new tool will allow advertisers to know with much greater accuracy how many people see their outdoor campaigns on average, as well as further useful insights such as age, class, lifestyle and shopping habits. It will be possible to plan by town or to choose from one of 24 major conurbations or 14 BARB areas. It should allow us to more effectively plan outdoor campaigns around the specific routes that a given audience take. At MC&C, we already use tools such as IPA Touchpoints to map media consumption through the day, and we’re pleased to hear that this new research from Route will be connecting with this to improve the accuracy of this mapping.

 

The research has already thrown up some eye-catching figures, for example, the average person will make eye contact with 27 roadside posters and 14 bus ads each day. Even more incredibly, every time London commuters make a tube journey they will encounter an average of 74 ads! In the era of such broad exposure to media it inevitably becomes more and more important that we are able to target as accurately as possible, and as such Route should hopefully become a vital tool in how we plan out of home advertising in the future.